Overall ClubsGreg Bailey

Alabama circuit court judge William E. Fort said “I would rather pay $6 for my overalls than $60 for a suit. This movement is no joke. It will bring down the cost of clothing.”

The United States was born in a protest and has continued to grow and often change as a result of protests from the Abolitionists to the civil rights movement, from women’s suffrage to the first Earth Day, down to the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street movements of today. One of the more unusual and short lived protests was the Overalls Clubs of 1920. After the Great War America found itself on the winning side but troubled with the aftermath of the war including inflated prices for everyday items they purchased before the war. Among the hardest hit consumer goods was clothing. Starting in the south in early 1920 men abandoned their suits and ties in favor of overalls to protest the rising costs. No one knows exactly who originated the idea or why they focused on the working man’s staple, if not a uniform, item of clothing. The movement, however, quickly caught the public's imagination and by April the protest brought together groups of men taking the pledge. The protest soon spread from the south to all parts of the country.

Wartime farmworkers, public domain

The Overalls Club of Birmingham, Alabama, declared itself the headquarters of the protest. The Alabama protestors established the National League of Overalls Clubs, adopting as its the official emblem of a pair of scissors. The local club had more than 5,000 members including judges, elected officials, lawyers, bankers, doctors and businessmen. Men routinely appeared in court and places of business wearing overalls.

Before long women joined the movement, pledging to wear calico or gingham dresses, the kind of clothing worn by the wives of those who wore overalls by necessity and not choice A few took the protest even farther with ''Brogan clubs'' whose supporters wore old shoes instead of new ones that cost four or five times the pre war price.

The movement was largely unorganized but widely supported, cropping up in unusual places. The entire student body of the University of South Carolina agreed to wear overalls. Students at Wesleyan University in Middleton, Connecticut, were required to wear either overalls or old clothes at all times unless they were “entertaining a young lady on campus.” Violators wearing suits were thrown into a swimming pool. Other colleges from Yale to Washington and Lee followed suit by banishing suits.

The protest spread from colleges to high schools all across the country. The superintendent of schools in Liberal, Missouri, ordered graduating senior boys to wear overalls to commencement and senior girls to wear calico. The pastor of the local Methodist church wore overalls during services.

William D. Upshaw of Georgia in a pro-prohibition photo op.,.

U.S. Representative William Upshaw, a Georgia Democrat, started a branch in Congress. Members and their staff soon began appearing in the Capitol building in their newly purchased overalls. The Post Office issued an order allowing mail men to make their appointed rounds in the symbol of the protest. The delegates to the Kansas state Democratic convention agreed to make overalls the ''official uniform'' of the gathering. Kansas Supreme Court Justice Silas Porter wore a pair to a session of the high court. In Lawrence the chancellor of the University of Kansas urged male students to follow his sartorial example and his wife urged co-eds to start wearing aprons over their clothes. Other state governments including Texas, Missouri and Oklahoma soon saw their capitols and courtrooms flooded with overalls.The Overalls Clubs did create some confusion in the country. The New York Times reported the sighting of a Gotham dandy on Michigan Avenue in Chicago wearing overalls over an expensive silk shirt displaying a luxurious handkerchief in the pocket. The newspaper also told of Edward Murphy, a janitor at a bank in Hannibal, Missouri, innocently emerging from his place of work. A crowd thought he was a banker supporting the movement and began cheering “Hooray for the overalls!” and “Just the thing, old top!”

Just as today, when presidential candidates awkwardly wear blue jeans for photo opportunities, politicians tried to identify with voters by joining the protest. Woodrow Wilson’s son-in-law William McAdoo had his own plans to live in the White House. The former Secretary of the Treasury appeared in public with some mostly symbolic patches sewn on his expensive suit pants. (McAdoo later lost the nomination.)

Advertsiment for overalls post WWI. Public domain.

But not every politician followed the fad. North Carolina Governor Thomas Bicket refused to join the movement. “There is no good in it,” he said. “It will run the price of overalls up to a figure which cannot be paid by those who of necessity must wear them.” The governor sarcastically suggested the protestors refuse to buy automobiles until the price dropped 25 percent. As long as people were “not willing to practice self denial all talk about cutting the high cost of living is gabble.’’At its height the Overall Clubs and their offshoots , counted hundreds of thousands of members. Fueled by newspaper reports, the protest spread to Canada, England and Argentina. By the end of summer, however, the novelty began to wear off. Worse, the movement, as some had predicted, backfired. As the demand for overalls increased the average price for a pair jumped from $2 to $6. The price for cotton rose as well, leading textile manufacturers in the north to allege that the movement was a southern conspiracy of cotton growers. The movement did cut demand for new clothing and shoes which did decrease the prices modestly. Above all, the fad had just run its course, and the public moved on to the next one, very much as it does today.

Greg Bailey is a St. Louis based history writer. He is writing a book on an event in America history from the 1920s.